Big Green Houses
by mooyoo
Summary: Rory tells someone about her first loves


Title: Big Green Houses  
  
Author: rachel  
  
Email: mooyoo4@hotmail.com  
  
Rating: G  
  
Spoilers: A couple for Season 1 and one for Season 2. Nothing really big.  
  
Summary: Rory tells someone about her first loves.  
  
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Amy Sherman-Palladino and WB own everything, as far as I know.  
  
A/N: Does Dean have a last name? I don't think it's ever been mentioned, so I gave him one :)  
  
~  
  
Who was the first man I ever loved? Well, the more appropriate question would be who was the first boy I ever loved, because we were little more than children when I fell in love for the first time. But even that question isn't a simple one.  
  
I know what you're thinking, but it's more complicated than the first guy I ever said I love you to. There were two men in my life at that point in time, although it wasn't until years later that I realized how deeply rooted the second one was inside of me.  
  
I guess the short answer to your question is Dean. Dean Nelson was the first boy that I ever loved; the first one I ever said I love you to. I was in tenth grade at the time, and had dated him for a few months before it happened. Actually, we were broken up at the time, but the words managed to escape my lips in a moment of desperation, terrified that I would loose him for the second time when I hadn't even had the chance to regain him. And that was when we got back together, staying that way through the end of high school.  
  
He asked me to marry him once. When you're seventeen years old and in love for the first time in your life, you think about things like that; that this guy, this boy who you've managed to make a connection with out of the ten billion, or however many, people in the world is the only other person who exists for you and that you could be happy for the rest of your life with only him. And you believe that he feels the same for you, and maybe he does, and that's when thoughts of marriage and children and families and big green houses with white picket fences and a dog running in the front yard begin to enter your mind, even while you're sitting in the middle of your eleventh grade chemistry class. At seventeen, in the middle of your chemistry class, you're ready for that big green house and all that comes in it, because you've only experienced seventeen years worth of life, and compared with eleventh-grade-chem class, life can't get much better than that.  
  
He asked me to marry him once. He smiled sweetly and I laughed softly and told him not to be silly. He said that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me and I assured him that we would, and I went back to looking at the stars that loomed in the sky above us. It wasn't until much later that I realized that the catalyst for his proposal was most likely my final decision to attend Harvard in the coming fall.  
  
No, it was never a choice, not really, despite the fact that I had for months previous assured Dean that I would consider accompanying him to Virginia, where he had already committed himself to James Madison University. I had always known that I would go to Harvard, and even my love for this boy couldn't sway me from a decision that I actually made about the time that I learned to speak the words Harvard University.  
  
He asked me to marry him; to promise myself to him for the rest of my life when I was just beginning to realize that I had barely even lived at all. And it wasn't until many years later that I came to realize that he was scared; that his declaration mirrored my own, made out of desperation, terrified of loosing me the way I was of loosing him years before.  
  
I laughed and told him not to be silly and fully meant it when I told him that we would spend the rest of our lives together. This day was the beginning of the end for us, though we held on to what little was left of our relationship until months later, both of us unable to let go of something that had been so important for so long; unable to realize that the boy who I thought I loved with my entire heart occupied only the small part which I had been aware of, and that maybe he wasn't the only person out there who I could love. It wasn't until I got to college that I realized, as most do, that people and things in my life that I had thought so vital, like coffee and Dean and perfect grades, were not quite as essential to me as I thought. Well, coffee actually became even more important to me, but that's neither here nor there.  
  
Maybe you don't understand me now, but you will. When you come to a place or a point in your life when you realize, really realize the person you are and the person that you want to be, you'll understand what I mean. But until then, I guess you'll just have to trust me when I say that people change when they go out into the world, even if it's only a few hours away, and that both Dean and I changed.  
  
Perhaps it was the distance that helped along the demise of our relationship, with me in Boston and him twelve hours away in Virginia. He almost didn't go, choosing instead to stay in Stars Hollow another year and then come up to Massachusetts for school, but I and his mother talked him out of it. I didn't want him rearranging his life for me, no matter how much we cared for each other, and in the end it wouldn't have made any difference anyway. It would have only delayed the inevitable.  
  
Maybe he saw it all coming, and so he asked me to marry him. I laughed and told him not to be silly and went back to looking at the stars. I had told him that we would spend the rest of our lives together. He didn't seem to believe me, but he didn't speak at all the rest of the night, and a we sat in silence together, looking at the stars, until he walked me home and we kissed goodnight and our relationship began it's slow wrap up.  
  
We said goodbye again four months later, and three months after that we said goodbye for good. It wasn't an angry separation, but a mutual one, both of us realizing that we had been hanging on for a long time to nothing and hoping for the return of feelings we had had when we were seventeen.  
  
Dean was the first boy I ever loved, found at the age of fifteen let go at the age of nineteen.  
  
The second boy I ever loved I also met when I was fifteen. However, I felt nothing but contempt for him for years. It really is funny how much life can surprise you, turning the boy you hate into one you love in just a few short years.  
  
I always knew he had striking eyes, and it was the one aspect of him I remembered most when he went away to military school during our junior year of high school, aside from his obnoxious over-ego and tendencies to be an ass. He had striking, sad, green eyes that always belied his obnoxious nature, though I never had the time, or the patience, to try to draw out what I thought might be buried underneath the abhorrent exterior.  
  
I remembered his eyes long after he had left, taking with him his constant and insufferable teasing, right up until the moment I saw them again, in my second semester of college.  
  
It turns out he had started college at Brown, mostly to please his overbearing father, who had been amongst a large number of other family members who had previously attended the school. But after one semester he decided that it wasn't for him and, to the horror of his father, who refused to continue supporting him following this decision, he transferred to Harvard.  
  
This was all revealed softly over a cup of coffee one evening a few weeks after our awkward reunion, after which we began a tentative friendship, though it took a few more weeks for me to fully realize that the glimpse of the human being I had had that night over coffee had not been just an anomaly.  
  
He used to tease me relentlessly in high school. I hated him for the longest time, and every time he let me see shades of his real personality, the one buried beneath layers and layers of anger and obnoxiousness and over-fed ego, he would immediately pull it back from me, as if a skittish dog afraid of being beaten by its master, and I often forgot that there was something else to him besides an ego.  
  
In college he acted much differently, though he hid himself in the same way he always had. He wasn't the same irritating boy I had once known, but he was still just as scared of showing himself to others as he had always been. Maybe it was military school, maybe it was being forced to take care of himself financially for the first time in his life when his father cut him off, but I could tell from the first day I saw him, standing in the middle of the cafeteria with a plate of scrambled eggs, that there was something different about his demeanor.  
  
That was when I began to fall in love with him; getting to know him again, getting to know the new person that he had become and drawing out the person that had always been hidden inside of him, all the while feeding off of the self-assuredness that I had always combated with. I began to realize that it was my banter with him, had always been my banter with him, when I felt the most alive, and that was when I knew that there was no going back. I knew that I had fallen hard, and that he had the potential to hurt me, and it only served to make me fall even more in love with him, because, as opposed to Dean, who always made me feel safe, he always made me feel alive. We argued incessantly, and he made me angry, made me laugh, made me feel warm. He made me feel.  
  
And one night while studying for finals in the library, I found that he felt the same way about me. He kissed me at 1:37am, amidst our fifth straight hour of studying. There had been no warning, nothing to prompt him to do it; he just stopped reading his book of Shakespeare suddenly at 1:36, and at 1:37 he leaned across the table and kissed me.  
  
I kissed him back. I smiled at him when he pulled back and we both went back to studying.  
  
So, there's the long answer to your question. Dean Nelson was the first person I ever loved. And Tristan DuGray was the first person I ever fell passionately in love with. 


End file.
